Tea with Jam and Dread (26 page)

‘You know what?’ I said next. ‘
I’ll
go. After all, he’s my hallucination.’

‘No,
I’ll
go!’ said my fourteen-year-old without a second’s hesitation, and not only did she step right in front of me, she stomped on my toes – by accident, of course.

‘The heck
either
of you will,’ growled the Babester as he grabbed a torch off the kitchen windowsill. He pushed his way past both lawmen, and if either of them intended to stop him they sure didn’t exhibit much of that intention. We all just followed in my brave husband’s wake and then gathered in a semi-circle around the entrance to the secret room. By then, I was so overcome with emotion that I fell to my knees.

‘If I thought that I could get up again,’ Sheriff Stodgewiggle rasped, for he was breathing hard from the exertion of walking, ‘I would likewise fall to my knees in prayer. As a devout Roman Catholic, I believe that Lord Jesus can work miracles on our behalf if we but ask, and most especially if we beseech Him through the mercy of His mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary.’

‘My mother doesn’t think that Catholics are real Christians,’ Alison said.

I gasped, which was very hard on my respiratory system at that moment. ‘Alison, that’s not true!’

‘Yes, Mom, it
is
so; you’re always praying for their salvation.’

‘Maybe, I do, but that’s only because if they were real Christians, they’d give up this Pope and Mary business and become – well, you know, Protestants.’

‘Like us Episcopalians?’ Toy said. ‘Are we Christians, Magdalena?’

‘Don’t be silly, dear, of course you are. You gave up Mary and the Pope when you put a serial killer, one by the name of King Henry VIII, in charge of the Church. But to be honest, Toy, there are some in your church who like the smells and bells part of it, the so-called High Church end of your spectrum, perhaps a wee bit too much. Knees hitting the floor in near constant genuflection – I don’t see why God would be interested in any of that.’

‘Ooh, ooh,’ Alison said, as she is wont to say when she is excited. ‘I went to one of them High End churches with my girlfriend, Cyndi. I loved that genuine inflection stuff, and the incense burner thingy was awesome. The rabbi kept swinging it around and around until it made enough smoke that all the old people choked. Yeah, that was so cool.’

‘I’m pretty sure that the man in question was a priest, Alison,’ Agnes said, ‘and not a rabbi.’

‘Yeah, whatever,’ Alison said.

Sheriff Stodgewiggle was still chewing on my judgement bone – or was it his? ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘does your husband possess the same narrow view of Christianity that you do?’

‘Her husband is a secular Jew,’ Alison said. ‘He don’t care what kind of Christian that she is, just as long as she stays off the Hell Train.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Sheriff Stodgewiggle said.

Just about then, the Babester came back into view and looked up through the Rabbit Hole. ‘Although I am a secular Jew, and not religious, I would like to point out that Satan is not mentioned in our Torah; neither is Hell mentioned. Eternal damnation has never been a Jewish concept. Just as long as the most beautiful woman to walk the face of this planet – that would be Magdalena – stays out of my spiritual life – I will keep my opinions out of hers.’

‘Hip, hip, hooray for you, Gabe,’ Toy said through cupped hands. ‘I would so marry you if we were both unattached gay men – which neither of us are.’

My Dearly Beloved laughed as he scrambled up the ladder. ‘Mags,’ he said, even before he had cleared the opening, ‘Melvin was definitely down there but he escaped.’

‘That’s impossible,’ Sheriff Stodgewiggle said. ‘I actually got down on my belly and shone my torch into every corner of your safe room. That’s a pretty nifty setup you have down there: sleeping cots, chemical toilet, tinned food, bottled water and even a little primus stove. However, and maybe it’s because you used to be a heart surgeon, everything is so neatly folded or stacked in such a way that there is no place for anyone to hide. Chief Toy, will you concur with my finding?’

‘Absolutely,’ Toy said. ‘I mean, I concur.’

‘How did you get off your belly?’ Alison said.

‘Alison!’ I said in dismay. Meanwhile, her father, the heart surgeon, smiled wryly.

‘Chief Toy lent me a hand,’ Sheriff Stodgewiggle said.

‘Be sure to return it when you’re through,’ Alison said.

The sheriff laughed and winked at me. ‘Out of the mouths of babes,’ he said.

‘She’s fourteen; she’s not a baby. What she said was very rude.’

‘Still, I like kids,’ Sheriff Stodgewiggle said. ‘Got to cut them some slack, I say. Growing up is hard these days.’

I shrugged off the child-rearing advice and threw myself unabashedly upon my now-fully-emerged husband. ‘Darling! What do you
mean
by saying that the monster was down there but isn’t anymore? How can you be
certain
of these things?’

‘Evidence,’ my hero said. ‘The weasel managed to crawl out through the ventilation shaft.’

‘Impossible!’ I cried. ‘Even a small child couldn’t squeeze through that, and the mantis has an enormous, bobbing head.’

‘Ah,’ the Babester said, ‘could it be that he has only a somewhat largish head and an extremely thin neck? Because the screen is removed from the vent opening and there is an empty bottle of cooking oil beneath it, and the shaft is smeared with oil as far as I could see. The edge around the opening is a little jagged, so no doubt he left a little DNA behind that will confirm that he was there. Oh, and then there was this.’

Gabe reached down the back of his shirt and pulled out a second shirt. There was no mistaking the shirt that Gabe held out as the same, monogrammed dress shirt that I’d seen at the start of the day on the Earl of Grimsley-Snodgrass, and then later on the serial killer of Southwestern Pennsylvania.

‘I think I’m going to faint,’ I said. Pride at being vindicated and fear of Melvin still being on the loose were two emotions that do not mix well.

‘I think I’m going to puke,’ Alison said. She has always been more pragmatic than I.

‘Before either of you ladies do your thing,’ the Babester said, ‘in the spirit of full disclosure, I feel that I should inform you that I also found a pair of shoes, socks, underwear and trousers stuffed into the shaft, which means that Melvin Sticklegoober Stoltzfus is running around outside as naked as a jaybird.’

Then Alison followed through on her threat.

I
t was almost six weeks later and the daytime temperatures had
cooled considerably. In fact, light frost was predicted in the valleys any night now, and the change of seasons had brought with it, much to my surprise, some closure. Melvin Sticklegoober Stoltzfus was still on the lam, but at least Yoko-san’s remains had been definitively identified and respectfully removed from my lift car roof. I had yet to reopen the PennDutch Inn, but if – or when – I did, it would no longer house a lift. Instead, I envisioned a wider, less steep staircase built in honour of Yoko-san.

Gabriel had heeded my advice, which was to stock the car with provisions before driving the children to a county fair all the way down in the State of Maryland. There they planned to gaze upon a big orange gourd – and happily so – without me whispering loving words of criticism into their jug ears. ‘
The world’s largest pumpkin. Large enough for Peter to keep his wife in
,’ the ad claimed. Ha! I mean, who can believe advertisements these days?

‘But it really is true,’ Agnes said as she put the first pin prick into my hot air balloon. ‘I was down there yesterday and I saw it for myself.’

‘
What?
Where
were you yesterday? And most importantly, with
whom
?’

For the record, this conversation took place at Agnes’s house as we were having tea and shortbread biscuits on her veranda while the afternoon sun still held some warmth. Agnes had been about to hold the plate of biscuits out to me, but snatched it back when she heard my tone of voice.

‘Why Magdalena, you sound almost jealous.’

‘I do
not
sound almost jealous,’ I said. ‘I
am
jealous.’

Agnes smiled as she gnawed gleefully on her treat like a giant beaver in a cartoon. ‘Well then, if you must know it was Mary Jane Greenhut.’

‘Harrumph.’

‘Is that all you’re going to say?
Harrumph?
Look, here is a photo of the two of us looking out through the pumpkin house windows.’

Agnes handed me a picture of an enormous orange vegetable – or was it a fruit? – that had a door and two windows cut into it. The windows were dressed with cute yellow curtains that were pulled back with blue ties. The ‘roof,’ which was just part of the shell, had been painted brown, but painted to look as if it were made from tiles. A black, crooked, stove pipe chimney, straight from a child’s storybook, projected from one end. Indeed, I could see the images of Agnes and Mary Jane quite clearly, but they were dressed in prisoner’s stripes.

‘Agnes, that’s plum disgusting,’ I said.

‘It’s only a joke, Mags. Peter locked his wife up in a pumpkin shell, get it?’ She crammed a shortbread biscuit into her mouth, just in order to punish me.

‘Better that Peter was penned up in the pumpkin than his wife,’ I said. ‘Those old nursery rhymes perpetuate sexist stereotypes.’

‘Are you serious?’ Agnes said.

‘You bet your bippy, dear,’ I said.

‘What is a bippy?’ Agnes asked.

‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘It’s just a phrase that I heard someplace, maybe once, and latched on to it like a tick on a bird hound. Anyway, I have some more information to share with you about that awful night – well, leading up to that awful night.’

‘What awful night is that to which you refer?’ Agnes asked.

‘What awful night is
that
, you have the
chutzpah
to ask?’ I said. ‘How about we start with the
day
that you got it into your shallow noggin to invite English nobility to Hernia but didn’t properly vet your sources. Ergo, instead of getting the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the cutest children on the planet – next to mine, of course – you brought Satan back to Hernia.’

Agnes crammed four shortbread biscuits into her mouth, and when she spoke crumbs flew everywhere like a dust storm. ‘L’esh not forget that you’re Shatan’s shibling,’ she said.

I’ve heard meteorologists refer to hailstones as large as golf balls while at the same time holding up pea-size pellets for the television camera. Would anyone believe me, I wonder, if I said that Agnes really did begin to cry tears the size of ice cubes? Well, she did cry! She boo-hooed and then hooed some more. I threw my gangly arms around my best friend, and in a move so not in keeping with who I am, I clasped her to my meagre bosom.

‘It’s OK, dear,’ I said, although of course it was not. ‘There, there, it will be all right.’ What utter nonsense to say at a time like that. What does ‘there, there’ even mean?

But what mattered is that my dear friend found it soothing and she slowly slobbered to a stop. I realize this is not a delicate way to put it, but there is no way to describe the aftermath of teardrops the size of ice cubes (the old-fashioned kind from ice trays, mind you). While she tidied herself up a bit, I snatched the last biscuit from the plate and discovered three more in a tin above the kitchen sink. I stuffed the three biscuits into the pouches of my cheeks, like a squirrel. For an amateur ventriloquist, such as myself, talking with food in one’s mouth is easy peasy.

‘What is your bit of news?’ she asked calmly, as if she’d never carried on akin to a child denied sweets in the cashier’s lane.

‘Do you recall how Pastor Diffledorf and his wife were less than warm and fuzzy to me on the day of – well, you know?’

Agnes is almost as good at sardonic laughs as I am. We have even joked that we should immigrate to the Island of Sardinia, and that once we were citizens we could help pass a law to change the name of the island to Sardonica.

‘Ha! Warm and fuzzy? They treated you like chewing gum on the soles of new shoes.’

‘Exactly. At first even Toy was toying – no pun intended – with the theory that they had also been recruited by the menacing mantis. Especially Mrs Diffledorf, because she really seemed to have it in for me. Then my Sweetie Pie, Honey Pot, who’s a doctor—’

‘Would you stop rubbing that in, Mags?’

‘Sorry. Anyway, he reminded me that in any given population one is a priori, predisposed to dislike roughly fifteen percent of the people whom one encounters. This is practically a biological fact, because it’s based on tons of research. The cues for why we may dislike these individuals can be very subtle, ranging from how they smell to the size and placement of their eyes, or ears, the sound of their voices, etc. This works in reverse too and helps us to choose our mates. But, given that the underlying principle here is human evolution, I can’t really buy into it. Still, it’s nice to know that the Babester thinks that it was their genes that caused my pastor and his wife to dislike me so intensely, and that it wasn’t anything personal that they held against me.’

My best friend reached across the glass top of her outdoor table to squeeze my hand in comfort. It was such a kind gesture, but
really
, after nearly fifty years of friendship (we were bathed together as infants) she should have known better, for my hands were safely back in my lap by then.

‘Oh, you’re so
English
,’ she quipped.

‘Really?’ I said. ‘As in British or the Amish sense of the word?’

‘Whichever meaning will flatter you the most,’ Agnes said.

‘The former.’ I was about to extol the virtues of the United Kingdom in general when I felt something warm and fuzzy bump against my elbow. It probably wasn’t the Diffledorfs, and I could see Agnes (who could frankly use a shave or a good depilatory), so I turned carefully and with a good deal of trepidation.

‘Gruff!’ I cried with immense relief when I saw that it was only Doc’s old billy goat. ‘What are
you
doing here? Who let you out of your pen?’

Agnes waved a plump hand dismissively. ‘He doesn’t live in a pen anymore. He lives in the house now – with me.’

‘
Oh?
’

‘Don’t judge me, Magdalena.’

‘I’m not – or maybe I won’t. First, just tell me where Gruff sleeps.’

‘He sleeps in my bed with me. What of it?’

I was flabbergasted. ‘Agnes Miller Schafer! That is a Sodom-and-Gomorrah-class sin! That’s exactly what Governor Tugwanker was warning us would happen if gay marriage became legal. You don’t plan to marry this goat, do you, Agnes? You do remember your scripture, dear, don’t you?’

‘Don’t be such a fool, Magdalena. In the first place, one marriage to an old goat was quite enough. In the second place, Gruff sleeps on the other side of the bed. And in the third place, this old goat’s already been fixed, so he’s always been a complete gentleman.’

‘Oh. But then what’s a dirty old goat doing in your bed?’

Agnes’s eyes misted up. ‘You hit the nail on the head. Gruff is old: at this stage he’s only partially housebroken, as I said. He’s no longer sexually active, he smells of body odour, he passes gas all night, he belches nearly constantly and he snores loud enough to drown out the cicadas when I leave the windows open. To sum it up, having an old billy goat in bed with me is like having a little bit of Doc back.’

I nodded slowly, as I was forced to punch yet another hole in my judgement ticket. ‘I’m sorry – yet again, I’m afraid. You do know that jumping to conclusions is how I manage to keep my girlish figure.’

‘That and running off at your mouth.’

‘Yes, I suppose that I deserve that.’

I scratched old Gruff between his two wicked horns. He seemed to really like that and kept nuzzling me for more attention. When I tried to stop he headbutted me with the front of his horns and knocked me out of my chair.

‘Bad Gruff, bad Gruff,’ Agnes said in the high-pitched tones of someone speaking to a baby or a
real
pet.

‘Agnes,’ I said, ‘you do realize that you could well end up being impaled on those things. Those horns.’

‘I’ll take my chances.’

We sat in silence until the chill of an autumn afternoon forced us to make decisions. I was the first to get up and call it a day.

‘Well, I had best be going,’ I said. ‘My family will be getting back from the fair with
their
tales of a giant pumpkin. I’ll have to feign surprise.’

‘Somehow I think that you’ll manage,’ she said. I didn’t know how to interpret her comment, but in any case, she wasn’t through speaking. ‘Magdalena, are you happy with your life?’

‘Am I happy with my life?’

‘It’s a simple question, Mags.’

‘No, it’s not. Let me turn it around; are you happy with
your
life?’

Agnes looked away to the gathering shadows along the edge of the woods. ‘No. I am not.’

I was stunned. ‘Why not?’

‘I don’t have a legacy. I’m half a century old, Mags, and I haven’t done anything that will be remembered by anyone after I’m gone.’

‘But that is so not true,’ I said.

‘Name one thing that I’ve done that’s made a difference,’ she said.

‘You volunteer for the Suicide Prevention Hotline. You organized a local fund drive for victims of the earthquake in Nepal. You drive meals to shut-ins and you even clean the home of one of them, a woman who is too disabled to do it for herself. Oh, yes, and you read to those blind Amish who will not avail themselves of books on tape.’

‘But who will remember
me
when I’m gone?’

‘
My
children. The children in the Sunday school class that you teach, and which you’ve taught for the last twenty-five years. Your neighbours, and their children, will remember you. Just about everyone in the community will.’

At last, Agnes smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But you still haven’t answered my question. Are
you
happy?’

‘I’m content,’ I said. ‘And I’m content with being content.’